The development of commerce and the rise of a merchant class in Tokugawa Japan have deservedly received considerable attention from both Japanese and Western scholars. In Japan that interest would seem to have been prompted by the problem of the rôle of the pre-Restoration merchant class in the development of the modern capitalist Japanese economy. The study of this problem was characterized by a long controversy in which the Tokugawa merchants were depicted as either “progressive” or “feudalistic,” depending on the historical philosophy of the participants. The argument was conducted at a high level of generality and on both sides within frameworks derived from the leading European (mainly German) schools of economic history. For some time neither side seems to have doubted the applicability of these frameworks to Japan's experience, but the controversy did eventually lead to valuable detailed studies of Tokugawa commerce and to attempts to interpret Japan's economic development in its own terms. Among the first to do this were the members of the so-called “Kyoto School” under Professor E. Honjō.

Studies of peasant rebellions in China are significant because of the key role such disturbances have played in Chinese history. Merely from the point of view of numbers one is impressed by the many references to agrarian violence in the historical records of the various dynasties. To be sure, usually these outbreaks were short-lived, but at times they reached such serious proportions as to become one of the major causes for the fall of a dynasty. Furthermore, as is well known, two major dynasties, the Han and the Ming, were founded by peasant rebels.

The first emergence of modern Chinese nationalism is usually placed in the A period just after China's defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. It was in 1895 that the youthful Sun Yat-sen made his initial revolutionary attempt to destroy the Manchu house. In the same year the nationalist-minded interpreter of Western political and social thought, Yen Fu, published a series of important essays which brought him for the first time before the public eye. Something of the spirit of the gathering tide of nationalism could be seen in the forceful editorials of Wang K'ang-nien (1860–1911) in Shih-wu pao (“The Chinese Progress”), a newspaper which he founded in August 1896 with Liang Chʻi-chʻao as chief editor. In one of his editorials (1896) Wang listed the components of China's national sovereignty that had been whittled away by the West and implored his countrymen to view this as the common shame of China's four hundred millions, rather than the shame of one or two persons alone. Wang struck a similar chord in another piece in which he argued that since the interests of all members of society were linked together, people should look upon the whole of society as one family and identify the common interest as their own.

The treatment of thunder and lightning in traditional Chinese writings demonstrates that many modern intellectuals have exaggerated the Neo-Confucian tendencies toward rational explanations and careful classification. The Chinese literati from traditional through modern times accepted as a self-evident fact the notion that thunder rather than lightning was the destructive force in thunderstorms. Moreover, captivated by popular beliefs that linked thunder with divine powers (Hammond 1992), few Chinese scholars were prepared to take the truly modern step of suggesting that thunder and lightning might be examples of natural forces acting randomly. This misunderstanding was compounded by the literati's indifference toward empirical investigation, which meant that they were unable to question the mistaken assumptions underlying this belief.

Following the october revolution, the Soviet Union regained majority control over the strategically located Chinese Eastern Railway, which ran through Manchuria, by signing two previously unpublished secret agreements: the first with the Beijing government on May 31, 1924, and the second with Zhang Zuolin's government in Manchuria on September 20, 1924. These secret agreements were signed despite the Soviet government's repeated promise that it would never resort to secret diplomacy. The Soviet Union also renewed control over the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway despite a 1919 Soviet manifesto promising that this railway would be turned over to China without compensation. To consolidate Soviet power over this railway, the USSR then signed the January 20, 1925, convention with Japan that recognized Japan's authority over the South Manchurian Railway in return for Japan's acquiescence to full Soviet authority over the Chinese Eastern Railway.

The Sadgapas and the Tilis, two Bengali castes broke with their parent castes. They formed themselves into new castes which gained higher social status than their parent castes in terms of the local caste hierarchy in Bangal. The emergence of the Sadgopa caste, as distinct from the Tilis, occurred at a period when none of the technological, political, and intellectual developments had yet occurred in Bengal that are generally used to characterize modernization. They were established as a caste by the second decade of the nineteenth century while the history of their growth and development goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Tili movement took an extensive form in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Tilis receives wider social recognition as a caste during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. The Tili movement was accelerated by modern conditions. Apparently the external factors helping social mobility varied from the case of the Sadgopas to that of the Tilis. But there are certain common features of development in both cases. Both the Sadgopas and the Tilis had collectively abandoned their traditional occupation to switch over to comparatively more lucrative and prestigious occupations, and became landowners. Complete dissociation from the traditional occupations which identified them with lower social ranks made it easier for the Sadgopas and the Tilis to aspire for better social status. But the crucial factor in their movements for mobility was ownership of land, which enabled them to have direct control over the life of the people in their respective areas and enhance their social prestige and power. This was the source of their strength as distinct groups and die source of their collective power to bargain successfully with the rest of the society for higher status. The incentive of corporate social mobility originated, both under traditional, pre-modern circumstances and under the circumstances of modernization, from the achievement of each group of a sense of corporate solidarity, regarding internal as well as external prestige. This enabled the groups to break away from the parent castes and to form new castes with higher social status. Previous writing on the subject has made this corporate solidarity a function of response to external forces, which are identified with only factors of modernization. It is the contention of this paper that corporate solidarity could have had its genesis in prcmodern times as well and that modernization marked only its acceleration.

Historians have overstated the role of adoption as a channel of upward social mobility for poor but bright young samurai in Tokugawa Japan. An analysis of family histories and public service records of four han shows that adoption helped to preserve both samurai lineages and the political system of daimyo rule. It also created opportunities for younger sons to remain in the elite class under a system of primogeniture. Adoption in the middle and upper (shi) ranks of the class was normally between related families of roughly the same social status. Where status differences were involved, the adopted son usually represented a higher status than the adopting family. The few records available for lower ranks (sotsu) reveal some marriage and adoption with commoners, but none with the higher ranks of the samurai class. In sum, adoption clearly supported the system of hereditary status, but rarely provided opportunities for poor but bright samurai to get ahead in society.

Since 2000, a number of performing troupes have been established in South Korea, made up largely of musicians and dancers who were professionally trained in North Korea prior to their migration and presenting a range of music and dances related to both the North and South. Combining ethnographic data with performance analysis of one such troupe, the Pyŏngyang Minsok Yesultan, I show how the nation and the state intersect in the space of performing arts as the troupe's creative culture reflects the settlement experiences of North Koreans in the South. While the troupe's organization, membership, and performance culture delineate migrant adaptation and understanding of their new citizenship, the performance of these Koreans is a complex terrain in which the two Koreas converge and are contested as the performers enact a constant negotiation between “being” and “negating” North Korean-ness, expressing their cultural hybridity as emergent citizens of the South.

The contemporary study of Chinese painting history varies considerably according to cultural locus, be it mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, or the West, making broad generalization about the state of the field quite difficult. Where the intellectual and social context of traditional East Asian culture remains most intact, the study of painting has perpetuated the concerns and modes of the thousandplus years of traditional historiography, yet this has become increasingly rare. In the People's Republic, innovation has come largely through Marxist influence, bringing a focus on social aspects of the art, but no systematic Marxist analysis has ever emerged and the influence of ideology is now noticeably on the wane. In the West, where most of those who study Chinese painting cannot themselves paint, do more than dabble in calligraphy, or lay claim to being part of the Chinese cultural elite, and where an understanding of the Chinese context cannot be taken for granted, the need for cross-cultural explanation has generated studies unique in character, blending sinology with Eurocentric art-historical questions and methods. This Western approach, with its skeptical analysis and egalitarian perspective, has provided new techniques of stylistic analysis for reevaluating the traditional dates and attributions of paintings and yielded a new, more objective basis for examining the theory, content, and sociocultural basis of Chinese painting.

In 1937, Burma formally separated from India. The separation might seem self-evident, given India and Burma's framing as distinct, bounded spaces. Yet, in the Patkai mountains straddling them, separation was a complex process with only a murky sense of finality, more problematic and contested than generally acknowledged. The border ran through similar groups and complex networks, which posed recurring problems for local inhabitants and frontier officials. As independence neared, colonial officials unsuccessfully tried to reshape the Patkai's territorialization. Viewed from the Patkai, the narrative of an amiable divorce between two ill-suited partners crumbles. The separation was one of several partitions that created bounded spaces across South Asia during the twentieth century. Seeing Burma and India as distinct others privileges spatio-cultural hierarchies rooted in colonial frameworks, assimilated by postcolonial political arrangements and nation-state-centric scholarship. This article foregrounds the need to explore how India and Burma were made against one another and recover alternative spatialities.

Today, seven nations have maritime or island claims in the disputed South China Sea. This article historicizes the claims of one of the dispute's participants, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It argues that cartographic representations of its territory have their origin in the period of French rule, and locates a key moment in the formation of an Indochinese—and later Vietnamese—space encompassing the South China Sea in a series of four maps that represented research carried out by the colonial Institute of Oceanography. By recreating the biographies of these maps, the article reveals their origin in a contingent interplay of multiple factors, including global scientific networks, economic development, imperial defense, and personal research agendas. The article suggests that attention to the biographies of maps could be an effective means of deconstructing and denaturalizing many of the territorial claims that drive the dispute in the South China Sea today.

By way of framing Manan Ahmed Asif's intriguing personal (and poetic) reflection entitled “Idol in the Archive” in this current issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, it must always be remembered that in August 1947, the old British Raj gave birth to not one but two independent nation-states, namely India and Pakistan. India became a “Sovereign Democratic Republic” when its Constitution came into effect on January 26, 1950, following adoption of its draft Constitution by its Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949. Pakistan took a bit longer, becoming the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan” when its first Constitution came into effect on March 23, 1956. Furthermore, of course, Pakistan underwent secession of its Eastern Province with the founding of the “People's Republic of Bangladesh” in 1971. It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that partition is the defining event of modern independent India and Pakistan, and, more than that, continues to be the defining event of India and Pakistan even after more than fifty years of independence.

The term munshi (scribe) usually refers to the clerical assistants employed by Indian lawyers (vakils), particularly by those who practice at the district and subdivisional courts at the lowest level of the legal system. The majority of vakils maintain only the most rudimentary records of their cases; their business correspondence is minimal and often conducted by postcard; the average law practice accounts are kept for the most part in the vakil's head, with occasional help from a note scribbled on a file cover. Not surprisingly, the routine duties of the munshi are relatively simple and easily mastered. They include safeguarding the documents the vakil does maintain during a case; completion of applications to the court; copying of cause lists obtained from magistrates' clerks; updating the vakil's diary of pending cases; occasional copying of case material; and running innumerable errands for the master, often of a purely domestic kind. In several respects, the munshi's role is a marginal one. His duties, for example, are not formally defined within the legal system. Nor are a munshi's services indispensible to a lawyer; many a vakil gets along without an assistant. The population of munshis at a district court is likely to be a transient one: munshis move from vakil to vakil, working only a year or two for each employer; and they drift in and out of the occupation, usually from and to ones of equally low status. Finally, the occupation is economically marginal: it provides a precarious livelihood for the majority of munshis; only a few are prosperous or enjoy much security.

The failure of Chinese agriculture to undergo a transformation whereby production could increase rapidly and institutional change could occur has been long regarded by many scholars to be one of the principal reasons China did not achieve modernization after the 1880's but instead became engulfed in revolution and war during the first half of the twentieth century. During the 1930's, various schools of thought explained this absence of agrarian transformation on the grounds that either institutional and social class relationships led to exploitation of the peasantry or that the lack of leadership and organizations failed to provide the peasantry with new farming technology and the resources needed to increase production.

In both China and India agriculture is the key sector and yet detailed comparisons of agricultural development in the two economies are difficult to obtain. A major problem is, of course, the availability and reliability of data. This paper puts together some of the information that is now available and assesses its reliability to draw some rough generalizations.

On the whole it seems that agricultural production in the two countries has grown at fairly similar rates. In terms of absolute level Chinese yield per hectare in most crops, of course, exceeds that of India by a significant margin, but this has been true for quite a long time in the past.

In provision of inputs like organic and inorganic fertilizers and irrigation water the Chinese performance has been much better than that of India. Both countries have devoted not a very low proportion of their total gross investment to the agricultural sector. But the effectiveness of this investment has been quite unsatisfactory on account of, among other things, technical deficiencies and faulty planning in both countries, and the excesses of over enthusiastic but unskilled party cadres in China and a very much restricted framework of village institutions and administrative setup in India. In land policy much of the period under consideration was taken up in China in bold experimentations—with the inevitable advances and retreats—in search of the optimum size of land management in a backward peasant economy, while in India in spite of copious land legislation some of the crucial land relations have remained basically unaltered. The Chinese policy of moving away from age-old small-scale family farming and of emphasizing joint management of land and labour has, on the one hand, significantly strained peasant incentives, but on the other hand rid Chinese agriculture of the burden of uneconomically small and fragmented holdings, tenurial insecurity and crop sharing which still afflict a substantial part of Indian agriculture. The problem of ensuring enough marketed surplus of foodgrains to feed the nonagricultural sector has, however, remained unsolved in both countries, in spite of all changes in institutions and production.

The Taiwanese Communist Party (TCP) was founded in April 1928 as a “Nationality Branch of the Japanese Communist Party” (JCP) by a small group of intellectuals trained in Japan and China. In its three years of existence, the small party confronted enormous difficulties in organizing a communist-led movement on the tightly controlled island. But the failure of the TCP to survive reflected more than just the efficiency of the Japanese police. Among the leadership of Xie Xuehong, Lin Rigao, Su Xin, and others, there was an incessant factionalism that was rooted in their own diverse political origins and in the often contradictory influence of Comintern, JCP, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies. By 1931, the party was disbanded, but, in its two “Political Theses,” the TCP had laid out a revolutionary strategy and a set of political goals that expressed the nationalistic aspirations of many of its leaders.